Freeb problems with openemr

mlfarrell wrote on Thursday, May 19, 2005:

I’ve been trying to get freeb to generate billing forms under openemr (hcfa), and through when I run “php -q process_bills.php bill” and it reports that everything was generated successfully, all I ever see are completely blank pdf files.

I’ve googled everywhere to see if anyone has had the same problems and the closest I found was an account of someone who forgot to add billing codes to the encounter (which I’ve added both cpt and icd9 codes).  I also have installed just about every perl module under the sun from cpan far above and beyond the ones required for freeb and I still get blank files.

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong??

sunsetsystems wrote on Thursday, May 19, 2005:

Have you seen this?  It includes some troubleshooting suggestions:

http://www.openemr.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=63

– Rod <rod at sunsetsystems dot com>

sankar1234 wrote on Tuesday, May 24, 2005:

I am not sure if you have resolved the problems.  I just some success with FreeB.   I am more interested in the FreeB generating EDI documents and HCFA documents. 

The problems I had was in Windows.  Are you running under Linux?

avedis wrote on Thursday, June 02, 2005:

I’m having a similar problem, but I’m not even getting as far as blank pdfs, unless I just don’t know where to find them.

I installed openemr-2.7.2-rc2.tar.gz and had to edit the files manually, since the install script failed in stage 4, I think. It seems to be running ok. ICD-9 and HCFA codes were present, but there were no CPT codes. I’ve entered one CPT code for testing.

When I go into billing, select encounter(s) and click on Generate HCFA & Print, it says the claim was successfully generated and queued.
When I run  ‘php -q process_bills.php bill’ in library/freeb, I get the following error messages -
Creating job for: 1-11 as hcfa returning pdf.
PHP Warning:  fsockopen(): unable to connect to localhost:18081 in /var/www/html/openemr/library/freeb/xmlrpc.inc on line 534
PHP Warning:  stream_set_timeout(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /var/www/html/openemr/library/freeb/xmlrpc.inc on line 535
Claim for PatientID: 1, Encounter: 1-11 failed due to:
Code: 5 Reason ‘Didn’t receive 200 OK from remote server.’<BR>

I looked in xmlrpc.inc and read the lines that were cited, but I don’t know what any of it means. Can anyone tell me what to do next?

Thanks,
Greg

drroller wrote on Saturday, June 04, 2005:

Make sure you have xmlrpc packages installed on your system, I did this on my system by just installing every package that had xml or rpc in the name. :slight_smile:

avedis wrote on Saturday, June 04, 2005:

Thanks. I checked, and all the xml and rpc packages are there. After reading some other posts yesterday, I figured out that I needed to install freeb from the cvs repository. I did that, and I’m up to the point of generating an empty pdf file. I’m also working with the cvs version of oer now. I’ll see what I can do with it later today.

avedis wrote on Saturday, June 18, 2005:

I’m still generating blank pdf files instead of hcfa bills. When I set FB.pl to debug and run ./formatbin/hcfa.pl [billing key] /tmp/logfile, I get the output below. Can anyone tell me what the problem is? If you need to see x12 output, I can provide it. It’s a lot longer than this. Thanks.

---- request ----
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>FreeB.FBProcedure.ProcArray</methodName>
<params>
<param><value><string>5-45</string></value></param>
</params>
</methodCall>
---- response ----
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- DEBUG INFO:

0 - new xmlrpcval(“5-45”, ‘string’)

–>
<methodResponse>
<params>
<param>
<value><array>
<data>
<value><i4>72</i4></value>
</data>
</array></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>---- request ----
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>FreeB.FBProcedure.ProcArray</methodName>
<params>
<param><value><string></string></value></param>
</params>
</methodCall>
---- response ----
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- DEBUG INFO:

0 - new xmlrpcval("", ‘string’)

–>
<methodResponse>
<params>
<param>
<value><array>
<data>
</data>
</array></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>

drroller wrote on Tuesday, June 21, 2005:

Installing the Prior Auth form fixed my blank pdf problem.

avedis wrote on Wednesday, June 22, 2005:

Thanks, I tried that, but it didn’t help. What do I have to read to be able to translate the debug output into English?

drbowen wrote on Friday, June 24, 2005:

Try the

http://www.oemr.org/OpenEMRWiki/FreeBInstall-Improved